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However, by ensuring that legal applications do not introduce rootkit-like tricks, PG makes it easier and more effective to create robust malware detection tools.
I spent a few years developing various rootkit detection tools and one of the biggest problems I came across was how to distinguish between a hooking introduced by a real malware and... a hooking introduced by some A/V products like personal firewalls and Host IDS/IPS programs. Many of the well known A/V products do use exactly the same hooking techniques as some popular malware, like rootkits! This is not good, not only because it may have potential impact on system stability, but, and this is the most important thing IMO, it confuses malware detection tools.
Patch Guard, the technology introduced in 64 bit versions of Windows XP and 2003 (yes, PG is not a new thing in Vista!) is a radical, but probably the only one, way to force software vendors to not use undocumented hooking in their products. Needles to say, there are other, documented ways to implement e.g. a personal firewall or an A/V monitor, without using those undocumented hooking techniques.
That means zero bugs in all the Vista kernel code, zero bugs in all the drivers that Microsoft supplies, and zero bugs in any third-party drivers that you happen to install. If a single one of those pieces has a bug, then the bad guys can get into the kernel.As if *any* bug in a driver would cause a vulnerability. No, IE, Windows, etc. have 1000's of bugs - a relativey low percentage are exploitable vulnerabilities! Nonetheless I would agree that vulnerabilities will exist. The only question is whether they can be patched. If so then I still think that's the best solution, provided patches are timely. The real issue the article raised is whether Symantec, etc. products without access to the kernel could clean a kernel infection, and I'm guessing not. That seems like a much more legitimate reason to have kernel access than pre-emptive scanning IMO. It seems like there is much less of a chance of a good workaround for that.
And hey I even learned a thing or two. 
The cross-platform argument really doesn't hold water, as you said - Opera is on at least as many platforms as Firefox and it's low resource using on all of them, *and* it has a bundled email client (and now bittorrent support, etc.). I'll take a look...And I wouldn't want to play anything on 33.6k dialup, which is the only connection that pc can have.Why don't you network it with your dsl computer? get a cheap router from ebay or something
). If we all hopped on Skype (or similar) we could voice chat too. )). The best wikis seem to be the hardest to setup. *sigh*